Saturday, September 26, 2009

Preserve your RIGHT to reading and free thought. Read a banned book this week and remember that books may come in all shapes and forms.

Intellectual freedom can exist only where two essential conditions are met: first, that all individuals have the right to hold any belief on any subject and to convey their ideas in any form they deem appropriate; and second, that society makes an equal commitment to the right of unrestricted access to information and ideas regardless of the communication medium used, the content of the work, and the viewpoints of both the author and receiver of information. Freedom to express oneself through a chosen mode of communication, including the Internet, becomes virtually meaningless if access to that information is not protected. Intellectual freedom implies a circle, and that circle is broken if either freedom of expression or access to ideas is stifled.

Friday, September 25, 2009

You are sitting in Mrs. Caldera’s kitchen,you are sipping a glass of lemonadeand trying not to be too curious aboutthe box of plastic hummingbirds behind you,the tray of tineless forks at your elbow.

You have heard about the backroomwhere no one else has ever goneand whatever enters, remains,refrigerator doors, fused coils,mower blades, milk bottles, pistons, gears.

“You never know,” she says, rummagingthrough a cedar chest of recipes,“when something will come of use.”

There is a vase of pencil tips on the table,a bowl full of miniature wheels and axles.

Upstairs, where her children slept,the doors will not close,the stacks of magazines are burgeoning,there are snow shoes and lampshades,bedsprings and picture tubes,and boxes and boxes of irreducibles!

You imagine the headline in the Literalist Express:House Founders Under Weight Of Past.

But Mrs Caldera is baking cookies,she is humming a song from childhood,her arms are heavy and strong,they have held babies, a husband,tractor parts and gas tanks,what have they not found a place for?

It is getting dark, you have sat for a long time.If you move, you feel something will be disturbed,there is room enough only for your body.“Stay awhile,” Mrs. Caldera says,and never have you felt so valuable.

Local and visiting poets will be reading works that explore a wide range of emotions and issues. Their individual poems, through the use of fresh images and language, investigate the nuances of the human condition while challenging the audience to reconsider commonplace ideas.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

They are
of the divided day,
Their dreams, still fresh, plastered on walls,
Hardened, opulent, a rolling frieze
Of the turning pocket
In certified largesse,
Until the train stirs
And the visions seeded, scatter
Among creeping grass.

Tuesday, September 08, 2009

Lucine Amara singsthe song of the crane,her voice haunting as "Taps"played by an open grave.An exile leaves Armenia.For the last time he seesArarat cast shadowson the tableland below,In tears he begs a cranefor news of the mother country.He tells his childrentales of their grandparentsin some foreign land.I listen to this melodyand I though Irish feelthe pain of roots torn up,and wonder who I am.

Bernard Rogers has taught at Dearborn Community College in Michigan. This poem was published in Ararat, Spring 1983.

Editor -- Lucine Amara is a retired Armenian-American operatic soprano, prima donna of the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

When twilight sinks among the cloudslike a fine comb,And the sniffing light wind stands stilllike a puppy,Before each bush, each tree or clod,and each person, And when youthful cold starts to showits real forceObliging us to button shirts and mutter wordsof displeasure,And when against velvety dark the day's uproarhushes itself,And here and there the lights that show seem to becomean old painting.

I have again become naive,I believe in right and justice,And it does seem to me that IShall die my own... natural death.

Sunday, September 06, 2009

I feel as if I were the residue of a stranger's life, that I should pursue you...

A long silk scarfdrapes over the dining room chair.Before we begin this supperI see you grandfatheras if I had never known that sense before.You wrap that scarfaround your waistmany times, secure itbehind a buttoned jacketand disappear.My mother, your last child, now sitswhere the scarf had been.She tells me to "take some of that, eat some of this."It was she who told me of the bullet wound;of the lead which bored its way through your torso,clear through the other endlike a warfare maggot.

I had never knownof your pain, until the sight of you now,had never thought of winteras the chill that swept through your wound,leaving you to cringe on the floor.Should I have felt that pain?Knowing it to be the result of pride,your love for your family,our Armenian descent?Or did you realize the strength you had foundwould survive decades -- secure a life for me?I have no wounds:you, who I can only imagine,have bequeathed to me just that.